WICKHAM COLUMN: 'March' anniversary events miss the mark

I don't know what to make of this remembrance of the 1963 March on Washington - one of the civil rights movement's most propitious and catalytic events.

I don't know why the focus on this important anniversary was watered down with multiple, commemorative marches - one today, the actual anniversary, and the other held four days earlier on a day that had no historic relevance. I suspect it had to do with competition for the national spotlight and not the excuse offered up by some that the original march took place on a Saturday. It didn't.

I can't figure out whether the Republican National Committee's decision to hold its own observance of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is a bad joke, or a cynical diversion from its efforts to frustrate and intimidate black voters. What else should I make of a luncheon the GOP plans for Monday, when there will be, no doubt, endless talk of how Martin Luther King opposed affirmative action. That's the Republicans' misread of the "I Have a Dream" speech the civil rights icon gave at the 1963 march.

That day, Dr. King said he dreamed a time would come when his four children "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." That was his dream. But his reality was very different.

"Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror," King wrote in his 1964 book, Why We Can't Wait. "The negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line in a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner."

I can't understand why, given the massive national attention that this March on Washington anniversary has received, more focus has been placed on the tragic killing of Trayvon Martin and the racial profiling injustice of New York City's stop-and-frisk law, than the black-on-black violence that takes thousands of lives every year in this country.

I don't know why the leaders of this celebration of the march's 50th anniversary can't bring themselves to make a campaign to end this carnage their highest priority.

"We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence," King said in the speech he gave from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial near the end of the 1963 march program. He was talking about the civil rights movement's non-violent challenge to racial discrimination. But today, those words can also be a compelling appeal against the self-destruction of the black-on-black killings that pile up more black bodies in a year than the white lynch mobs amassed during the entire 20th century.

Sure, getting more jobs for blacks is an important goal. Yes, more needs to been done to close the black-white achievement gap in the nation's public schools. And more young blacks need to be given a fair chance to fund their college education. In many of these efforts, King said inWhy We Can't Wait that the federal government must "move resolutely to the side of the freedom movement."

But more than anything else, King's message from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on that Wednesday afternoon in 1963 - and in the book he wrote soon after - ought to inspire today's civil rights leaders to get their act together; and should put to flight the Republicans who try to hijack his memory.